It is only a relative difference between Hegel and the Brahmans that the latter make their intellectualist mysticism individualist and world- and life-denying, while Hegel carries his through as world- and life-affirming, and makes the intellectual act take place only when a society has produced the requisite spirituality. The inner similarity in character of the two world-views is not affected thereby. One is the complement of the other. Both give value to ethics only as a phase of intellectuality. With Hegel, as with the Brahmans, ethics are indeed given a shelter, but they are not shown to be necessary. For the production of the consciousness of oneness with the Absolute the decisive element for the Brahmans is, in the last resort, only a sufficient advance in world- and life-denial, and depth of meditation. With Hegel, society, which has to produce the spirituality in which the absolute spirit experiences itself in the finite, could come into existence just as well by means of law alone, as by means of ethics and law together. His ethic is, in truth, only a species of law. With the Brahmans ethics are a colouring which their world- and life-denial takes on for a certain distance; with Hegel they are a similar mode of self-manifestation of his world- and life-affirmation. Hegel’s world-view is in and by itself supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-affirmation, just as that of the Brahmans is supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-denial. That his world-view is this and nothing else Hegel admits in the fit of brutal frankness under the influence of which he wrote on June 25th, 1820, the famous Preface to his _Philosophy of Law_. Our task (he there explains,) is not to [pg 147] re-fashion reality in accordance with ideals which have arisen in our spirit, but we have to listen to the way in which the real world affirms itself, and us within itself, in its own immanent impulse to progress. “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” The eternal which is present under the form of the temporal and transient and is developing within this, it is worth our while to recognize and thereby to become reconciled with reality. It is not for philosophy to set up ideas about what is to be. Her task is to understand what is. She does not produce any new age, but is only “her own age comprehended in thought.” She always arrives too late to be an instructor as to what the world ought to be, and she begins to speak only when reality has completed its process of construction. “Minerva’s owl does not begin her flight till darkness is closing in.” Beneficent peace will be brought us by the sincere recognition of reality.